Faculty Fellow: Dr. Ayesha Sadaf

Cato College of Education

2019-2020 Teaching Faculty Fellow

Promoting the National Standards for Quality in Online Teaching Practices

At UNC Charlotte, the number of online courses has more than doubled in the past five years. Given this rapid growth of online education, ensuring the quality of online course design has gained considerable concern. The goal of this project is to promote National Standards of Quality in online teaching and support colleagues in their efforts to design and teach effective online courses in the Cato College of Education. Dr. Sadaf will use her experiences and skills to help faculty transform student online learning experiences through the application of Quality Matters (QM) Standards and innovative online instructional strategies.

Biography

Ayesha Sadaf is an Assistant Professor in the Instructional Systems Technology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her Doctorate in Learning Design and Technology and Master’s in Computer Graphics Technology from Purdue University. She teaches 100% online courses and has more than 15 years of experience teaching and developing online and hybrid courses. She is the recipient of 2015 Distance Education Best Practice Award from the Division of Distance Learning in Association of Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) and 2016 Effective Practice Award by the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) International Conference. She currently serves as the Associate Quality Matters Fellow in the Center of Teaching and Learning at UNC Charlotte. Dr. Sadaf’s research focuses on instructional strategies and emerging technologies that promote higher level learning, cognitive presence, critical thinking, and engagement in online learning environments. Her research has been published in Educational Technology Research and Development, Computers & Education, Internet & Higher Education, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, American Journal of Distance Education, and Journal of Computing in Higher Education. She is the recipient of the 2013 Distance Education Best Journal Article Award from AECT and 2017-2018 Excellence in Research Award from the Cato College of Education UNC Charlotte. Dr. Sadaf has served as the President of the Graduate Student Assembly (2011-2013) for AECT. She has also served as the Communications Officer (2015-2017) and is the incoming President-Elect (2019-2021) of the Division of Distance Learning (DDL) for AECT.